New York City

NEW YORK — At 8:32 a.m. Wednesday morning, on the first day that the National September 11 Memorial Museum opened to the public, 26 uniformed police officers and firefighters marched onto the lawn of the memorial and unfurled an American flag that had flown at 90 West Street, adjacent to Ground Zero, for weeks after the attacks. Civilians involved in the restoration of the flag and children from the 9/12 Generation Project filled in among the honor guard designated to see the National 9/11 Flag safely back to Ground Zero. Grasping the edges, they raised the 36-foot by 26-foot flag as the Fire Department of New York’s Emerald Society Pipes and Drums Band played. “Kids, kids, today is a very important day. We’re here to remember, pay tribute, and learn about what happened on 9/11. But we’re also here to remember, pay tribute, and to learn about what happened on 9/12,” said Jeff Parness, founder and chairman of New York Says Thank You Foundation. “People from all around the world came here to help us in our time of need.” Torn and damaged by smoke and debris, the flag was removed in October 2001, and for the next seven years it lay in storage in Pennsylvania.

The people who talk the most about 9/11 and how we came together as a nation and international community didn’t live here. New York City is it’s own world, it’s an American City but an international metropolis. It is a city mired in extremes of duality and 9/11 is the perfect example. I was here on 9/11 taking the 2 train to downtown Brooklyn to go to my university. Trains stopped working an from on the hill on Eastern Parkways I could see like may other the smoke coming from the towers. That day I saw a lot of raw emotions and panic. The next day 9/13 there was an outpouring of emotion. 9/13 there were attacks on random Muslims. A friend of mine got her hijab ripped off and was spit on.

That’s the NYC I know. Living in NYC, for me is like battling Cervantes windmills. At any moment the City may swing it’s ponderous arms and bury you deep into the mire. Or that same arm can raise you to the heights of passion, fraternity, love etc. NYC is at one time a symbol and a real city. Actually NYC is the example of hyper-reality.

The the Argentinian writer Jorge Luis Borges’ in his “On Exactitude in Science” has the example of a society whose cartographers create a map so detailed that it covers the very things it was designed to represent. When the empire declines, the map fades into the landscape and there is neither the representation nor the real remaining – just the hyper-real. Luckily I know this city really well and can navigate through the many layers of reality.

I was scared the days after 9/11, you couldn’t voice anything critical of the government. If you discussed our policy in Afghanistan during the cold war which in the long run helped create this situation, you would be slammed. Somehow it was un-American to sift through the debris of our failed foreign policy to see what events lead to this event. Basically, all this talk about freedom of speech and all these great benefits are privileges dependent on the predominating social and political climes.

How can we pay tribute to the people who died here, if we continue with our exploitative foreign policies, or our prison abuse scandals in Abu Ghraib, our drone army. Even if we don’t consider all these things, how about what we treat minorities. Many people selflessly gave their lives to helps those trapped or trying to escape from the towers.

A Brooklyn man is claiming cops falsely arrested him for driving without a license after they dented a parked car he was merely sitting in – and embellished details about the caught-on-tape accident. Robert Jackson, 31, said he was waiting in his girlfriend’s Ford SUV outside his Brownsville home on April 2013 when a patrol car drove against traffic on the one-way street. Trying to avoid an oncoming truck, the police vehicle backed up and damaged its bumper and nicked the SUV. Officer Christopher Oliver wrote in the criminal complaint that he “went to the driver’s side door of defendant’s vehicle and observed the door open and the keys in the ignition” before arresting Jackson for operating a vehicle with a suspended license, according to the document. But a surveillance video Jackson obtained from a neighbor clearly shows he immediately shut the door upon exiting the car and that the cop never went near the driver’s side as he claimed. “I thought it was a joke,” Jackson, who works as a porter, said Thursday about the questionable collar. “The cop said, ‘Dude, you ran into me.’” Jackson had to spend the night in jail and appear in court multiple times before the criminal case against him was dropped by prosecutors six months later, records show.

The Sad Part

Things like this is why the black community and the nypd will never have good relations. Above this I don’t know why this isn’t headline news? The gentlemen will sue the city and WIN and then guess who gets to pay ….? We the tax payers! this is coming out of your pockets. Fire these pigs immediately!

It comes down to money, it always comes down to money. Americans hate the idea of taxes or paying more taxes. When cops do dumb things the city gets sued and “we the tax payer have to shell out more money” I wonder if racist acts didn’t affect tax payer’s bottom line would any-one care?

Cops can trump up false claims and despite the NSA’s extensive global and domestic spying networks there is no way to address that. What’s worse for me personally is that the US military is handing over leftover equipment from the Iraq conflict to police under a military surplus program. Civil liberties groups have criticized the initiative as unnecessary and a move toward the militarization of American law enforcement. American law enforcement agencies have received 165 MRAPs — 18 ton, armored vehicles with gun turrets — this year.

I was reading a rough draft of one of the posts I wrote this week to a friend, and she asked me if there was anything I loved? Is there anything that isn’t the recipient of my vitriol and acerbic words as of late. After I reminded her that my vitriol is biodegradable and doesn’t harm the environment, I told her, in effect the same thing I am about to tell you.

I find life tragically beautiful in its ephemerality as well as its enduring nature.

Today on the way to work I saw two homeless men sharing a space together in a train station.One homeless man was Caucasian and the other was Black. The Black guy was helping the white guy tie his shoes- he was quite old and had difficulties with his joints. From the way he did it, you could tell that he had done it countless time before.What struck me the most about this tender scene between friends was that they didn’t see each other’s color, they didn’t see the disapproving looks being sent their ways.

I have lived through difficult periods of times and I have always noticed that when one is on the fringes, when society choses to ignore you as if you don’t exist, so much tension that we see in our society dissipate. As long I feel as we are addicted to the drug of materialism,of acquiring more and more, the more we deny ourselves the pleasures of looking past our sociological conditioning, and seeing human beings where once people we were scared of and don’t like used to stand.

I stayed to look at that image. There was something redeeming about it. Maybe one day the tension will give way to something greater and blacks and whites will one day work together side by side inside Chinese concentration camps. Wherever there is tragedy there is comedy I find. I looked at my news feed on Facebook recently and I found these two articles in this exact order.

Study Shows White People Believe They Experience More Racism Than Black People

Researchers from Harvard and Tufts University have conducted a surprising study which shows that white people think that much needed racial progress has been made since the 1950s — but at their expense. Both racial groups indicated that there has been some definite change in the racial climate since then. But the surprising piece of the puzzle is that white people now believe that the decrease in anti-black racism has led to the rise of anti-white racism. In other words, white people believe that equality has been reached but that this has subjected them to experience more racism than black folk.

A 16-yr-old African American boy was sexually assaulted by a police officer during a “stop and frisk” pat-down. The assault was committed with such violence that the youth’s testicles were literally ruptured. Now, Darrin Manning of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania may never be able to father children, according to the doctors who performed surgery on his virtually destroyed testicles. Darrin was a star basketball player with no criminal history to speak of. He was a straight-A student who never got into any sort of trouble. He was with his teammates heading to a game right after school when he encountered an officer who decided he was “suspicious” and needed to be subjected to local “stop and frisk” procedures. All of the boys with Darrin had scarves covering the lower parts of their faces. But this was simply due to the extreme cold weather that had swept the region, with record-low temperatures that day. Veronica Joyner, the Principal of the high school the teens attended, said that she herself had given the boys scarves to wear to keep warm in the freezing temperatures. Twenty minutes later, she was informed of Darrin’s “arrest.”

There is something deeply disturbing here in the story of Darrin Manning, especially when you consider he is being still charged for reckless endangerment of another person, simple assault, and resisting arrest. But there is something almost comedic when you place the two headlines together.

I write on this blog to shed light on these instances of comedy and tragedy that force us to question our humanity personally as well as collectively. I write sometimes to provoke a reaction and see if people nowadays still have a heart, because I am not convinced we do any more. I write because I am sad and angry that the very organizations that are supposed to serve us keep us divided. I write because I feel alone in what I see when I look out the window. I also write because its the only time I feel good.

This isn’t a popular blog, and it was never meant to be. I wanted to talk to people who cared, people who have a sense of humor and who find life beautiful as well. To be nominated for this award was particularly special, especially when there are so many more entertaining blog posts out there like the Best Taiwanese Beef Noodle Soup one lol I will stop.

List one thing — however small — that you think would make the world better if everyone did it

Nominate bloggers whom you feel help to Change the World — there’s no minimum or maximum, just a list of those you feel are deserving

One thing small I would do that would make the world a better place is make it mandatory for everyone to volunteer to do work that helped the disadvantaged. I do not mean sitting in an air-conditioned office, I mean actually interacting with the people being helped etc.

You should never get advice from someone who has been jaded in love. Beneath that demure exterior lies deep oceans of bitterness and vitriol enough to kill all the hope on this planet twice over. One day I asked old man Charlie: “How is it that some people can hold contrasting opinions at the same time?” He said: “That’s because women cry as a means of circumventing accountability.” Harsh stuff, but Old Man Charlie had, as the gossip goes, been left by the love of his life. After vowing to never marry again, he grew old and cynical and sadly had only chronic masturbation and the faint sounds of the young couple that he shared a wall with having sex, to rely on as friends. Time and his bitterness has made him stiff, well at least his tube socks or handkerchiefs.

Since that conversation didn’t answer my question, I have continue to ponder how and why people can hold opposing views at the same time. Consequently with that said, today I will expose the popular myth Americans seem to have about Mexicans .

Follow Me on This

All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.”

Lazy people do not want to work, they do not like to work, and will avoid work at all cost, even going so far as to take advantage of the government largess in the most nefarious of ways: i.e. staying on welfare, or becoming a politician. So then would someone who has paid thousands of dollars to be smuggled into the US in the most sometimes, inhuman condition, or under threat of being beaten, jailed or even shot to cross the border, in order to go on a job-working spree …would that person be considered lazy? Logically this doesn’t make sense.

WHAT DOES THIS MEAN

It means that we as a culture are hooked on a special brew of xenophobia, racism, class warfare. Few countries do it as well as America. Let me give you a scenario, here is how it works:

It all starts with the 20o year old propaganda machine telling the poor huddle masses from the world they can come here for truth justice and liberty and a chance for economic success. Then targeted countries are selected and either through foreign policy, enforcing certain economic policies, or an assault with ballistic missiles, or through just worldwide catastrophe etc. Then conditions are created where people will have taken leaving everything behind and move. Once they are here they are gradually used as tools to scare those of us who are already here. Since we are a nation of immigrants there is a deep-seated fear of losing and missing out on what we feel is rightfully ours.

Does any one remember the Mexican-American war ? Here are some facts:

The Mexican-American War was an armed conflict between the United States of America and the United Mexican States from 1846 to 1848 in the wake of the 1845 U.S. annexation of Texas, which Mexico considered part of its territory despite the 1836 Texas Revolution.

A month before the end of the war, President Polk was criticized in a United States House of Representatives amendment to a bill praising Major General Zachary Taylor for “a war unnecessarily and unconstitutionally begun by the President of the United States.”

American settlers in Texas, wanted to break away from Mexico, there is long-running political and cultural clashes between the Mexican government and American settlers in Texas. Texas wins it’s freedom, border disputes soon enough war. Then the huge annex of land from the Mexicans.

Finally

The idea that Mexicans are lazy is one racist xenophobic propaganda that was spread for a while. Mexicans stealing Jobs is another racist xenophobic bit of propaganda from different era. Mexicans are not any more or less lazy than anyone else, and they don’t really steal jobs from the majority of Americans. It’s not that serious.

The deep freeze hit the US, and plunge everyone into this sacerdotal reverie for all things summer. As luck or circumstances would have it, pipes in my building burst and long story short there was no heat or hot water for four days. I once lived in a drafted basement with no heat or hot water for a year. The best part was that this basement opened into a back alley where I saw drugs being sold, a cop case, rapid pit-bulls and dirty used condoms, but that is a story for another day.

A friend from across the pond, asked me today, how did it feel when it was 4 degrees outside and -11 with windchill taken into account and 32 degrees inside your house? Immediately I thought of this joke from Paul Mooney (Adult and offensive language is used check out now if you offend easily).